News Desk
MALE’ — The Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage has invited bids from public relations companies to handle media and communications work across the ministry and six of its agencies for a two-year period. The deadline for submissions is 14 July.
The scope is broad. The selected firm would manage press conferences, build relationships with local and international media, run social media accounts, produce annual reports and deliver public awareness programmes. The agencies covered include the National Centre for the Arts, the National Centre for Cultural Heritage, the Dhivehi Language Academy, the National Bureau of Classification, the National Archives and the National Library.
The announcement is straightforward enough. The questions it raises are less so.
The ministry has had a complicated relationship with its own communications. Under its previous incarnation, when the portfolio was held by Minister Naseer, the ministry developed a reputation for opacity rather than openness. Information that should have been public was difficult to extract. The ministry’s relationship with the press was transactional at best. Hiring a PR firm did not appear to be a priority then. Now it is.
Minister Heena Waleed has brought a different style to the role, and there is genuine goodwill toward her approach in some quarters. But goodwill is not a procurement policy. The more substantive question is whether the selection process for this contract will be genuinely merit-based or whether it will follow the pattern that disappointed those who applied for a researcher position at the ministry not long ago.
That process left applicants with a clear impression that the outcome had been decided before the applications were read. People with relevant academic and professional credentials found themselves passed over without explanation. The process felt, in the words of more than one person who went through it, cosmetic. A formality dressed up as a competition.
A PR contract is a different kind of appointment, but the principles of a fair procurement process are the same. Who evaluates the bids, on what criteria, and whether those criteria are applied consistently and transparently will matter. In a ministry whose mandate includes the preservation and promotion of the country’s cultural heritage, how it communicates that work to the public is not a minor administrative question. It goes to the heart of what the ministry is for.
The bids are due by 11.30am on 14 July. Whether what follows is a genuine competition or a process that arrives at a predetermined destination will become apparent in due course. The ministry would do well to be aware that people are watching this one with the previous experience very much in mind.
